You Can't Always Get What You Want
by CaffieneKitty
Summary: Poor Molly.


**Warnings:** brief mention of child death and auto accidents  
><strong>Disclaimer:<strong> Neither the world or the characters are mine, and I believe Molly is specifically Moffat and Gatiss' creation.**  
><strong>**A/N:**I seem to be bound and determined to give characters crappy days. I doubt the staffing schedule I have here for the morgue in any way correlates to anything found in reality. Also, please note, this does not adhere to the blog-tie-in BBC!canon of how Jim and Molly met, because I was most of the way done writing this before I checked, silly goose that I am. :-P

**-.-**

**You Can't Always Get What You Want**  
><em>by CaffieneKitty<em>

_-.-_

Molly's shopping basket was a stereotype; three kinds of chocolate ice cream, three kinds of biscuits, an economy pack of tissues, a stack of single-serve frozen dinners and a box of Kitty Num-nums. It practically screamed, "Lonely pathetic single woman with cat has had exceptionally crap day."

Someone jostled her from behind. "Number three's open, luv."

She sighed, shifted forward in the queue to the automated check-out and started running her purchases across the scanner.

Work had been hell; nothing specific, just long, draining and frustrating, with a considerable amount of bureaucratic agony over paperwork someone else had messed up, but she had been blamed for. Plus the usual, grieving families, mangled accident victims, corpses under twelve... she was trying to put the details out of her mind.

Sherlock had been there for an hour in the afternoon asking after spare toes and being confusing at her as usual. She knew he was likely just nice to her (on the occasions he was nice), to gain access to the morgue. She wasn't an idiot. It was just nice to dream sometimes.

_"Please re-insert card. Please re-insert card. Please re-insert card."_

And now the automated check-out was having her on. Fantastic.

-.-

The phone rang. Molly hit pause, freezing Cory Monteith's face on the laptop screen, and answered.

"Hi, Moll. Got a bit of an emergency here, could you cover for Carlisle?"

"I've just got home. I worked more than a full shift today, Brian."

"I know, I wouldn't call if it wasn't desperate. One of the A&E doctors is having a bout of angina, Faraday's covering for her, and Carlisle covering for him-"

"But I had-" _Plans. Eating myself sick on chocolate and watching a bunch of American kids sing and be better friends for each other than I'll ever have. Some plans._

"Please Molly? You're really my best hope. Everyone else has family or kids or-"

"Yes," she snapped. _I'm only the best hope because I have no life._Molly squinted her eyes shut, then opened them to see her bowl of half-melted ice cream dribbling chocolate and caramel on her countertop. She sighed. "Yes, yes, it's fine. I'll cover. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

"Good. Thank you."

Molly hung up, closed her laptop and put her gooey chocolate mess in the freezer.

-.-

At least it was quiet. One corpse had come down from A&E, straightforward unrecoverable myocardial infarction, quickly processed, leaving the rest of the night for administrative tasks. Molly was almost caught up on the day's paperwork when there was a loud rap at the door.

"Hello?"

A tidy little man poked his head around the door. "Hi! Is it safe?"

Molly huffed. "Of course it's safe."

"Just, you know. Dead bodies. Creepy."

"And yet that's what we're all going to be some day." _God that was morbid Molly Hooper. It's no wonder you're single._

However, the man's eyes glittered and he whooped with laughter. "Oh that's true!" His face lit up, eyes going wide as he crooned the word 'true'. "Very philosophical!"

Molly covered her mouth and giggled. "Um. Thanks. Sorry, but why are you here? It's gone 3 AM. Bit of a funny time to be visiting a morgue without a reason."

"Oh, right. I'm with IT. My name's Jim." He wiped his palm on his trousers and held it out, grinning as Molly took it.

His hand was warm compared to the ambient temperature in the room, but not sweaty. Very clean, tidy fingernails. He didn't grip too hard, and his skin was very soft. It was nice. Molly smiled at him. "I'm Molly, Molly Hooper."

"We're swapping out the last of the old CD drives for DVD-RWs tonight," Jim ducked his head towards her desk, held up a boxy grey drive and waggled it, making the trailing wires dance. "Won't take a minute, but I'll need you to shut down your station so I can get my hands into its guts. So to speak."

Molly shut down the workstation and stood, but stayed by the door of the office to watch Jim work. The novelty of having someone living to talk to in the morgue after midnight was not one to be wasted.

Jim unplugged her tower and pulled the sides off. "So, what do you do when you aren't hanging 'round the dead?"

"Oh, not much, telly, cat. The usual things."

"What's your cat called?"

"Toby. He's a ginger tom."

"Ooo, lovely. I'd love to have a cat but it's against the rules at my flat."

"Well you, um." Molly said, then stopped herself before saying 'you could come visit Toby at my place' because there was lonely, and then there was desperate. "What about you, what do you do when you aren't, um, gutting computers?"

"Oh, this and that," he said from under the desk. "Nothing really interesting. What do you watch on TV?"

"Well..."

-.-

Half an hour later, Jim was sliding the side panels back into place on Molly's tower, still smiling and nodding as she ran through the recent plot developments on Glee.

_No one ever listens to me this much about anything besides work. Sometimes not even that._

"Sounds fascinating," said Jim. "I should try watching it some time."

"Even if you don't care to follow the plot and things, it's worth it for the music. I've got all the episodes up to date, and the new ones start in April. I, um... download them off the internet."

Jim's eyes sparkled. "Molly Hooper, you lawbreaker!" he said, mock-scandalized.

"It's not that bad." Molly giggled. "I'll be buying the DVD set when it comes out, so this is just a preview."

Jim smirked, packing away his tools. "Sooooo, I was thinking, we're both working the night shift, would you like to go somewhere after? For breakfast? We could... chat." That grin again, and another sparkle in his eye.

Molly grinned back. "I'd love to!"

"I'll meet you here at shift change then!"

"Great!"

Molly waited until after the door closed and Jim's footsteps and whistle had retreated down the hall before clapping her hands together and twirling around like a maniac.

"I think I've got a date! An actual date!" She hummed 'Don't Stop Believing' under her breath as she logged back in to her workstation.

A date with a nice guy from IT named Jim. Maybe things were looking up after all.

- . - . -  
>(that's it)<p> 


End file.
